Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to nutraceutical compositions and methods of administering them for the treatment of inflammation or inflammation associated disorders.
Embodiments of the invention also relate to nutraceutical compositions extracts from a plant capable of treating inflammation or inflammation associated disorders.
Description of the Related Art
In this specification, where a document, act or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was at the priority date: part of common general knowledge, or known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which this specification is concerned.
The use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), such as aspirin and ibuprofen, for the treatment of pain, inflammation and fever is well known. Adverse reactions from such drugs are widespread and increasingly prevalent resulting in over 100,000 hospitalisations in the US in 2001. Some of the newer NSAID's have been shown to increase a patients risk of myocardial infarction by 80%.
Moreover, there have been a number of increased adverse drug reactions (ADR), particularly when the NSAID was taken in combination with a COX-2 inhibitor.
Some common gastrointestinal ADR's observed include, nausea, vomiting, dyspepsia, gastric ulceration and diarrhoea, other more severe ADR's have also been observed to include hypertension, interstitial nephritis, acute renal failure and photosensitivity.
NSAID's work primarily as a COX inhibitor, and certain NSAID's were developed as specific COX-1 or COX-2 inhibitors.
In 2004, the US FDA issued a public health advisory on the safety of Vioxx™, a selective COX-2 inhibitor, on the basis that there was an increase in cardiovascular events observed in those taking the drug.
In 2005, the US FDA issued an alert for practitioners in relation to the safety of the NSAID Celebrex™ again on the basis of the observed increase in cardiovascular events in patients taking the drug.
As a result of the above there has been a general reluctance to prescribe known NSAID's in many situations, or to prescribe reduced dosages in an attempt to combat the adverse side effects currently being observed.
NSAID's have long been used in the treatment of joint inflammation as a form of pain relief.
Shark cartilage provides significant improvement in joint health in an experimental model of immune-mediated arthritis (Pivnenko et al., 2005), and may improve sulfate uptake into new proteoglycan molecules.
Similarly, there is clinical evidence for the efficacy of perna mussel as a treatment for degenerative joint disease in dogs (Pollard et al., 2006; Bui and Bierer 2003). Likewise abalone has potential benefits in alleviating and treating joint disease. It has a high concentration of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (Su and Antonas 2004) which are known to reduce the formation of inflammatory eicosanoids (Mesa Garcia et al., 2006) and at least in part account for the inhibition of nitric oxide production (Pearson et al., 2007). The latter being linked with chondroprotective and analgesic properties (Pearson et al., 2007).